TUCSON, Arizona (Reuters) – Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' medical condition was upgraded from critical to serious on Sunday, eight days after she was shot through the head by a gunman at close range.

Doctors said they upgraded Giffords' condition because she was no longer attached to a ventilator. Surgeons on Saturday replaced a breathing tube that ran down her throat with a tracheotomy tube inserted through a hole in her neck into her windpipe.

"The congresswoman continues to do well. She is breathing on her own," said a statement released on Sunday by the University Medical Center in Tucson. "Yesterday's procedures were successful and uneventful."

Doctors said Giffords had been breathing essentially on her own for days but had remained hooked up to a ventilator in part as a safeguard against infection.

The hospital said they planned no further updates on Giffords' condition until a news conference scheduled for 11 a.m. local time on Monday.

Doctors also have fitted Giffords with a feeding tube, a practice not uncommon for patients in intensive care with brain injuries.

Giffords, 40, had been the only patient in critical condition from the January 8 shooting that left 12 other people wounded. Six more gunshot victims died in the rampage. One patient was discharged on Saturday, leaving two others hospitalized in good condition.

Doctors have expressed satisfaction with the pace of Giffords' recovery. In recent days, she has opened her eyes and is tracking the movement of objects in her field of vision. She also is responding to simple commands, such as raising her fingers and wiggling her toes.

Giffords, a Democrat representing Tucson and southern Arizona, was elected in November to her third term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Jared Lee Loughner, 22, a college dropout from the area, has been detained as the lone gunman suspected in the rampage. He is charged with five federal felony offenses, including attempted assassination of a member of Congress.

Federal authorities are planning to move Loughner's trial to San Diego because of extensive pretrial publicity in Arizona, The Washington Post reported on Sunday, citing federal law enforcement sources.

They cited publicity and the sensitivity of the case in Arizona, where one of those fatally shot was John Roll, the state's chief federal judge, the Post said.

The new chief judge, Roslyn Silver, will make the final decision about any venue change, but one law enforcement official told the Post, "it's going to happen. It's just a matter of time."

The rampage sparked a national debate about whether the vitriolic tone of partisan politics in the United States in recent years had contributed to the suspect's motivations.

(Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Jerry Norton)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sargent Shriver, a former Democratic vice presidential candidate and brother-in-law of former President John F. Kennedy, has been admitted to a hospital in suburban Washington, a hospital spokeswoman said on Sunday.

The spokeswoman for Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, confirmed Shriver was in the hospital but declined to provide any additional information.

Shriver, 95, suffers from Alzheimer's disease.

Shriver was the first director of the Peace Corps, created during the Kennedy administration. He helped his wife, Eunice Kennedy, who died in August 2009, create the Special Olympics for mentally disabled children and adults in 1968.

Shriver helped launch President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and was briefly a presidential candidate in 1976.

In 1972, Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern chose Shriver as his running mate after his first choice for the job, Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton, was revealed to have undergone electric shock therapy to treat depression.

McGovern and Shriver lost to incumbent President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew in a landslide.

Shriver's daughter, journalist Maria Shriver, is married to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor of California.

(Reporting by JoAnne Allen; Editing by Peter Cooney)

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) – A mass of unusually moist Pacific air swept the northern Rockies on Sunday, dumping wet snow in the mountains and heavy showers in the valleys as forecasters warned of increased avalanche hazards in several states.

The threat of heavy runoff in the Pacific Northwest from the same warm, wet front also prompted the National Weather Service to post flood advisories across several counties in Washington state and southern Oregon.

Rainfall in the Northwest was expected to total between 1 to 3 inches, while icy roads made driving difficult in parts of the Rockies.

Rain freezing on highway surfaces forced the closure of a section of Interstate 94 northeast of Billings in south-central Montana, according to the state Department of Transportation. And freezing rain driven by high winds made for treacherous travel conditions on I-90 in southwest Montana near Bozeman.

Forecasters from Montana, Idaho and Washington state said avalanche hazards were high where accumulations of heavy, wet snow was making steep slopes unstable.

They cited the elevated risk of natural or human-caused avalanches in back-country areas of western Montana, central Idaho near the ski resort of Sun Valley, Mount Hood in Oregon and the Olympic and Cascade ranges of Washington state.

Conditions were especially grim in the mountains east of Flathead Lake near Glacier National Park, where avalanches last weekend killed one snowmobiler and trapped several others. That fatality brought the avalanche death toll in the Rockies so far this season to six.

Avalanche danger also prompted the Idaho Transportation Department to shut down 12 miles of a state highway between the state capital Boise and Sun Valley.

In the Idaho Panhandle, the U.S. Forest Service issued a high alert for avalanches for upper elevations of the inland Northwest -- which also includes eastern Oregon and eastern Washington -- except on groomed ski runs.

Moisture rolling through the Northern Rockies Sunday afternoon was at the highest levels recorded in mid-January for the past 30 years, said Jessica Nolte, meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Missoula, Montana.

"It's 250 percent above what would normally be observed," she said.

What was rain in parts of Montana and Idaho was falling as snow in northwest Wyoming near Yellowstone National Park, where forecasters predicted as much as a foot of snow.

The same storm was expected to dump up to 16 inches of snow near the exclusive resort town of Jackson, Wyoming by early Monday evening.

(Additional reporting by Wendell Marsh in Washington; Writing by Steve Gorman; Editing by Jerry Norton)